I remember a Wyeth hanging in the home of Senator McGovern when we dined there. When I asked if it was original, the Senator said yes, then paused and said that he believed it was, and that though he had several times met and talked with Wyeth, it was not a gift from Wyeth.

it's my favorite painting in that entire museum. it's one of the first paintings you see as you get off the 4th floor escalator. i keep a postcard size print in my room. i always seem to have a different interpretation of this scene- perhaps depending on my mood. it never occured to me when i first saw it that she was crippled. but i always feel that she's trying to get to this distant place that is within her sight. the painting for me therefore has this tension. a movement, however slow or labored. a yearning. cause it seems we all want to get to that certain place.

It is remarkable that a single image can convey both yearning and dread. The painting is a piece of masterful contrivance on Wyeth's part, contrivance not being a pejorative term. First we get the impact, which is immense. Only later do we become conscious of the deliberate compositional devices Wyeth used to achieve his effect.

Look at the painting. Don't rush. Sink into it. The elements that make it work will emerge. You'll see.

Ah yes, the highest goal according to the average New York art critic. Cultural disobedience. That's how I'm going to couch my opposition to Barack Obama. We'll see how far that gets me in the New York Art Scene. Cultural disobedience only goes so far, you see.

At the same time, he blithely ignores the judgment of Wyeth's most prominent champions such as former Met Director Thomas Hoving. ("In 1976," writes Kimmelman, "Wyeth was given a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum." That's it.)

The only generous thing he does is to let Wyeth have his say -- and Wyeth is darker, more serious, and more discerning than Kimmelman can ever understand:

Wyeth added: “Let’s be sensible about this. I put a lot of things into my work which are very personal to me. So how can the public feel these things? I think most people get to my work through the back door. They’re attracted by the realism and they sense the emotion and the abstraction — and eventually, I hope, they get their own powerful emotion.”

I do have an impression that art realists may get surreal when they face modern style.Just kidding. Let's note that the NYT appeals to readers with of a High Critical nature.[All others need not apply]. My more plebian Joy of Art comes from the wonder about the creator artist's life experience as deduced from his Oeuvre. What made them see and think like that? So all art gives me some pleasure. Like Meade said, it's not either/or, but enjoy them all.

"Because of his popularity, a bad sign to many art world insiders, Wyeth came to represent middle-class values and ideals that modernism claimed to reject"

"...so we hated him, and tried to destroy him. And now he's dead. Our paintings, that no one ever looks at except in passing, are unpopular and reject bourgeois values, so we know better. Nyah nhyah nyah."

Intellectuals are so frequently wrong, it seems, that it appears to be some kind of mental defect, one that prohibits them from seeing what is right before their noses.

"Wyeth came to represent middle-class values and ideals that modernism claimed to reject"

Modernism didn't claim to reject "middle-class values and ideals". That's just Michael Kimmelman's little 68-er wet dream. Because what could be more middle-class than being one of the most forgettable art writers at the country's biggest failing newspaper?

I've often thought that "art" was primarily about separating the worthy from the masses. Thus, anything over popular is automatically bad, because it's not "art" unless you're one of the few able to appreciate it.

Synova... Don't fall for that put-down by industrial strength elitists. They may get to feel that they are adding something special from their performance. But you can enjoy the experience on your own level. They'll never figure out why you're smiling while they are way off in left field. The artist worked to reach you, even thru time, at his/her moment of true expression. The critics are like the CSI TV series and they never get to meet the subjects alive.

Hey, maybe I'm crazy for thinking she was blind. I have a friend who grew up on Cushing and remember her talking about being scared of her and her eyes. And I've always thought of her as blind. But that may be one of those ideas that gets planted early and takes root without being true.

Art critics mostly heaped abuse on his work, saying he gave realism a bad name

That single sentence was most irritating, suggesting that Wyeth or, indeed, all artists consult critics to orient and correctly apply their vision so as to not offend the critics delicate sensibilities.

I love Wyeth but Christina's World is one of my least favorite. Ones like MadisonMan's favorite A Wind From the Sea are more to my liking. Like I feel about Grant Wood: love the Iowa landscapes but not his most famous American Gothic.

Pogo wrote: "Intellectuals are so frequently wrong, it seems, that it appears to be some kind of mental defect, one that prohibits them from seeing what is right before their noses."

I know what you are saying, but maybe that applies to pseudo-intellectual posers. The phonies are obscure and oppositional in order to ape the revolutionary ideas of the true intellectuals they attempt to copy.

I mean, people like Thomas Sowell, an intellectual by any measure, make sense! Contrast him with someone like Greenwald and I think you see what I mean.

Kimmelman's notion that Wyeth paints with a "mechanical and unremarkable realism" is stunningly obtuse. Wyeth did one painting (not mentioned in the NY Times article) of a waist-high boulder alone in a field. In his painting the rock comes across as mysterious and powerful. Yet when one sees a photograph of the actual rock that Wyeth used as a model, one is stunned to see that it is ordinary and uninteresting in every way, a rock and nothing more.

This what Kimmelman missed. Wyeth took ordinary objects and filled them with haunting emotion (kitchen curtains blowing in the wind) and even dread. In this sense, Wyeth isn't realistic at all. It's remarkable that Kimmelman doesn't get this.

Along with our host, I grew up where Andrew Wyeth was recognized as a celebrity. (I remember my 5th grade teacher describing his order of pork chops at a butcher they both frequented.) As a child, I never thought of him as an artist; the images were just too familiar. Then, as an adult, I had opportunities to see the paintings, and I was astonished.

The difference between Wyeth images and Wyeth paintings cannot be overstated. Take this. As an image, it looks bizarre. As a painting, it looks amazing.

Christina stretches for a home she cannot walk to. That beaten house is probably as much a part of her pain as her pinched vertabrae. And for all that, that house is the only home she knows and can even visualizing knowing....I didn't know that until I read the back story, but I felt all that in the painting.

My family went to the museum in Chadd's ford over xmas. I stayed home to wrap presents, then found out they got a personal tour from one of the Wyeths. Not Andrew obviously. I like the Jamie Wyeth stuff there better. The museum is on rt 1, hang a right on 202 going south and you're just a few miles from the Charcoal Pit.

you know i have this human souland i can still remember last timebefore i was reborn as a cockroachi was a 12 tone composer and music professorat a 3rd rate state u but now i live near harvard uwhich is probably comeuppance for my last lifeanyway when i was in a human bodyand believe me i was in as many femalegrad students human bodies as i could bewhich may be one reason i m a cockroach nowi remember that only abstract expressionismwould do over at the art deptjust like only 12 tone or serial music wasif you were a composer and no matter whatyou had to like it if you were a serious modernperson at all but i don t think that applied tocockroaches which is one benefit of my current statusyes abstract expressionism and serial music wenthand in hand at the college of arts and godhelp you if you had any other ideas i know i sure didn tso if you were a studio art student and paintedan actual picture of something you might as wellhave composed a piece of music in g majoroh the shame

abstract expressionism and 12 tone music alsohad a lot of trendy leftish ideas stuck to themlike mold on an overripe fruit ready to drop intosomebody s hands except if you werean old fashioned communist you had a problemcause stalin liked mickey mouse and minuet in gand zhadinov would send you to siberia forbourgeois formalist tendencies if you thoughtjackson pollock or anton webern were coolah the rat maze of politics and artexcept most of the rats i know these daysare smarter than that which is another problem

bourgeois was the catch all epithetused against art like andrew wyeth si bet you thought i d never get to the pointand i ve got to tell you i still get a little queasyat christina s world because it was part of the airi breathed that stuff like that was stupidand sentimental bourgeois illustrationdark and humorless as it isi remember this visiting french art professorand several of us going to a wyeth exhibitin town for a good laughexcept he was a little dark and humorless himselfand used to puff his cigarette between his thumband forefinger with his hand turned toward his faceand say ah you amerwicains you are so bourgeoisyou theenk a fire burning in ze fireplace is expressifwhat is expressif is a fire burning ze house downi think he was a structuralisthe would sit in his cafe on the rue de bac thinkingand then amble over to the universite and teachfor which the republique francais paid him enoughto sit in a cafe on the rue de bac in paris thinkingi was luckier because the state u where i taughtpaid me enough to not have to think at all

no tenure for poor wyeth and no cafe sitting eitherhe had to paint pictures and gasp sell themso the non trendy ignorant bourgeoisiecould gape at them not understandingthe slightest thing about artexcept you can see the grass bladesoh the shame